Water Quality Team

Participants

Introductions

Hi - Emil Petruncio here, from USNA in Annapolis. I have been teaching Waves and Tides, Satellite Remote Sensing, and Ethics for Military Leaders since I arrived at the Naval Academy in December 2004. I will begin teaching Quantitative Methods in Oceanography this semester. With Jim's help, I incorporated a GIOVANNI-based class project in my remote sensing class, and have also guided a student in the use of GIOVANNI and other satellite data sources for an independent research project. I'll try to come up with some potential projects for the workshop, and will post my thoughts to this site.

Cheers,

Emil

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Hi All from Ed Laine

I am looking forward to meeting everybody in a few minutes. When I teach at Bowdoin College I try to enable of community based and problem based learning in my students. I work closely with a community partner, the Friends of Casco Bay (FOCB), who has an excellent and long standing (at least a decade) citizen/volunteer monitoring program in Casco Bay. My classes usually provide more intensive sampling and measurements than the volunteers can manage. Through the good influences of Jim and SERC I have started using Giovanni in my classes and have had one wonderful success which I will talk about next week.

If you ever want to know what the ocean is like in inner Casco Bay, tune into our ocean observatory
http://gyre.umeoce.maine.edu/data/gomoos/buoy/html/D02.html

Talk to you soon

Ed

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Hi Everyone, from LuAnn, who works at TERC from her home in Mesa, Arizona. I've been working as part of the AccessData team since its inception. It's always interesting to work as part of a group that represents the full range of stakeholders in getting data used. I'm thrilled at using this approach to develop some initial activities for Citizen Scientists!

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Hi, this is Jim. I've uploaded my first cut at a datasheet for examination prior to the workshop.

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Hi Everyone, this is Erin. Sorry for the late post. As a quick introduction, I'm a curriculum developer at TERC in Cambridge, MA. My background is in astronomy, but the majority of my work over the last year+ has been developing Earth science curriculum focused on sustainable fisheries, coral reefs, and sea level rise. I'm really looking forward to working with all of you on this new and exciting project. See you all tomorrow!

Afternoon
Perhaps take a look at chlorophyll in different seasons and before and after rainy or dry seasons.

Consider building a database with photos and locations of water quality measurements. This might be done in Google Maps (or some specially designed open-source tool) or some publicly accessible place so folks can compare their water quality measurements to other folks'.

Consider the value of being able to compare your data over a full year (or more). Make sure people can see their data.

Using satellite data
Generate a spring image of chlorophyll. Compare it to summer, fall, and winter.
Look at images from months when weather events occur.
For instance, Santa Anna winds, floods in Mississippi watershed,

Add "Eddys that feed the Sea" EO story to datasheet. Biologically rich lenses.

How does chlorophyll distribution vary over seasons?
Here's how to document where chlorophyll is.

NEO's transect and probe tools could be used to compare months (3 at a time).

Start with a single image (a monthly image that we identify with some )
and help folks interpret what the colors mean.
Higher concentrations are closer to land and close to rivers.
Generate an animation.

Check EO images for a nice natural color image of a phytoplankton bloom, check monthly chlorophyll images in Giovanni (or daily images in NEO) to find one that pops. Identify two others that folks can find on their own.
Spring bloom in North Atlantic. March 28, 2003
March 16 2004 off coast of California, search for image ID 16487

So what?
Global chlorophyll images (animation?) frequently show high concentrations around river mouths and near the Galapagos and springtime "flashes" in the north.
There're also places where you never see chlorophyll: deep ocean basins.

Let's frame the science question for the satellite image analysis:
Is chlorophyll good or bad?
Is chlorophyll near or far from land?
How does river runoff effect chlorophyll?
Does wind effect chlorophyll concentration?
What are the necessary ingredients for the growth of chlorophyll?
Why is chlorophyll good or bad for fish?
How do we measure chlorophyll from space?
How and why would we measure chlorophyll in the ocean?
Secondary: How does chlorophyll concentration change over seasons?
What can chlorophyll tell us about dead zones?
Why is chlorophyll measured from space?
Can we get a big picture view of plant life in the ocean?
When is phytoplankton growth not good for the ocean?
Ingredients for phytoplankton growth: sunlight and nutrients.
This year, is your area making a bigger or smaller possible contribution to the formation of a dead zone?
How does what's washing off our land effect the ocean?

#1: (How) Does your local stream or river affect marine ecosystems?

marine ecosystems?
the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean?
health of coastal waters?
the health of marine ecosystems?
along the coast and in the ocean?

What contribution does your local stream or river make to chlorophyll growth in the ocean?

Does it matter if your community sends stuff downstream?

Look at maps of river mouth for different times of year, zoom into mouth of river, does chlorophyll concentration change over time or other conditions.

Gather data to understand when chlorophyll is higher and lower.

watersheds carry nutrients to the ocean.
#2: What are the necessary ingredients for growing phytoplankton?

Here's what phytoplankton growth looks like in the ocean.
Point to paired natural color and chlorophyll images
Look for places that have higher concentrations
Zoom in on the Mississippi, an extreme example. (too extreme??)

Provide a range of testing procedures
Low end test: Secchi disk test for clarity http://water.epa.gov/type/rsl/monitoring/155.cfm
Aquarium/pool test kits
Water test strips (include links to suppliers and costs $.25 to $1 per test)
Water test kits ($1000 instrument plus $33/10 tests) http://www.chemetrics.com/index.php?Page=methods&tab=1
Encourage folks to work together or find a sponsor. Perhaps the local high school or college has testing equipment you could borrow?
High end: Send samples to laboratories ($10 to $20 per sample??)

Once folks identify an area with relatively high chlorophyll
Parameters that indicate a developing dead zone:
Low DO
High SST
CDOM (Colored Dissolved Organic Matter) (water turns brown) increases with discharge.

Table S1 in the Supporting Online Material has a list of all "dead zones" around North America and the world. This should help citizen scientists trying to understand the impact of local and watershed land use practices.

I think it would be useful if the citizen scientists could determine whether their river flowed into the ocean next to one of these dead zones, but am having trouble getting EDNA to output that. Problem is for the west coast and the south Atlantic states EDNA only delineates broad watersheds with many rivers acting as point sources all along a very long coastline. Of course, maybe I am doing it wrong. Help.

A note from LuAnn on 8/21/08:

Hi Ed and everyone else:

Thanks for posting up the very timely article to the group! The listing of dead zones was really interesting: I only wish it were in an Excel worksheet or a database or a GIS so I could sort them by different parameters and make some maps and graphs. With several missing values and no delimiters, I couldn't get the data into Excel easily, but I'm sure it can be done with a little time and effort. Joining the 2nd table (the one with lat/long values) to the dead zone listings could also enhance the ways folks could use the dataset. (It occurs to me that this data prep might be a good assignment for undergrads who are spending time "living with" data, or perhaps the study authors would provide us with a database file?)

In looking for a way to solve the problem Ed described, I used Google Earth with the EDNA (Elevation Derivatives for National Applications) watershed outlines, available at http://edna.usgs.gov/watersheds/kml_index.htm and searched for a couple of the dead zone "System" entries. In some cases, the named System is part of an identified watershed, but in other cases (as Ed mentioned), it wasn't clear. I used the lat/long of the system from the second table to find where some of these dead zones were and visually examined which rivers or land area might be contributing to their formation. This made me wonder if there's an overlay that would show current directions in the ocean, or if I could use buoy data to figure out which river mouth was "upstream" from a dead zone. I think the complexity of the problem of determining if your watershed is contributing to the formation of dead zones is a worthwhile challenge that will engage people–especially if we make it clear that it's an open-ended question.

For our chapter, I'm thinking that producing a publically accessible Google Maps or Google Earth map with placemarks denoting all the dead zones and associated info would be a good start. It would be a great place to send folks for an initial exploration, inviting them to move upstream (or up current) from several of the dead zones to figure out which land areas the freshwater is coming from.